And what have the Jews ever done to deserve any of this? Are the Jews really the masterminds behind every war, every revolution, every economic disaster, every plot, even the Holocaust itself? Yes, according to anti-Semites, either the Holocaust never happened and was made up to secure Israel as a country for the Jews; or else the Jews instigated it to force other Jews to flee Europe to Mandatory Palestine, to take it over. Just read a few comments on YouTube as a measuring stick for this mental illness.
Of course, I know the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion says all this (apart from the Holocaust slurs), but the Protocols is a forgery;2 and not just a forgery, but a cheap and shoddy product of the Tsarist secret police before World War I. Even though it is now more than a century later, some people still treat this libel as Gospel, and write comments on YouTube to prove that the Jews are the worst of mankind.
In Arab countries, after many years, the Protocols is still a bestseller. And Hitler’s Mein Kampf, tagged in 2011 by Waterstone’s in the UK as the “perfect Christmas present“, in its electronic form is selling hand-over-fist. How hurtful — and deeply unjust — that is to Jews who have just made critical advances in medicine or saved a Palestinian child’s life when operating in an Israeli hospital, or journeyed to Africa to teach better methods of farming, or travelled with an Israeli aid team to Haiti or the Philippines to save yet more lives.
The Jews are not the worst of mankind; they are like the rest of us, some bad, some good, and some so talented they have left indelible marks on every field of human endeavor. They have always been an underappreciated force, above all in the realm of ethics. No religion has developed in so well-structured a fashion as Judaism; its impact on Christian and Islamic ethics is well attested. Without the Jews, a major force for good and a barometer for moral concern would be taken from civilization entirely — or is moral concern something the world would secretly rather do without?
The irony is that it is precisely these prejudiced, conniving, and racist haters of Jews — including those who envisage the destruction of the one and only Jewish state and those who conjure up a realistic threat of a second Holocaust — who have the arrogance to treat the Jews, including the Israelis, as if they are the most prejudiced, the most conniving, the most racist of all mankind — and the most immoral — and, of course, deeply inferior to Christians or Muslims.
The false piety of much Christian condemnation of Israel is matched only by the cheap moralizing of the followers of Islam in their attacks, both physical and verbal, on the Jewish state; or their failure to recognize that Jerusalem was always a Jewish city; that there were two Jewish temples there; and especially in the obsessive Palestinian refusal to recognize any part of Israel as a Jewish entity, or to make peace with Israel, or even to acknowledge that there has been a continuous Jewish presence in the Holy Land for three thousand years.
The loss of Israel — engineered as it would be by a coalition of “progressive” Muslims and Western secularists, along with anti-Semitic Christians and hard-line Islamists — would not be a victory for any of the values we hold dear. On the contrary, it would be one of the greatest disasters to befall mankind. The values we consider highest – such as peacemaking, neighborliness, cooperation, caring for the less fortunate, for those of different religions, ethnicity, and mutual defence against aggression – would start to crumble, and our sense of human progress would weaken and lose its hold on our minds and hearts. If we could do that to the Jews, a people of great deserving, who have done so much for us, what might we then do to others? For even if the Jews were gone, there would still be other, weaker people for us to persecute and eliminate.